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Comment by flagrant_taco | Hacker News Reader

I assume calling out specific topics like users'sex life is a CYA move. They could very well be storing any and all audio in the car, at which point they could store info on anything said.

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I agree, I assume the manufacturers aren’t out there writing code to detect, categorize and store sexual acts happening in their cars, and then selling that data to third parties.

But the fact that we’re even discussing this is ridiculous.

That does not sound like a safe assumption to me at all. If someone will pay for that data, I am quite sure it is happening.

It’s especially easy to imagine happening implicitly: feed everything into an ML system and if it tags it with something like “(sex noises)” or “(moaning)” (which Hollywood subtitles and other things in someone’s training data probably have) that’s searchable without anyone explicitly setting out to build a system.

I'd assume they are more likely to get valuable data from people talking about their sex life, if companies are actively trying to monetize in that way

Oh, sure. The point is just that nobody has to put a business goal in to directly create that feature for it to be exposed by a general purpose classifier.

If it were truly a CYA move, shouldn't it mention any & all audio? Conversations were not listed by Mozilla, but surely that would be extremely privacy-relevant, for example.

I do think the data collection method seems puzzling, but if it were as simple as audio, I think that's what would be mentioned.

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